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Doesn't work (Brave on Ubuntu).  Characters or Play buttons both go to a water background, no controls, banner "No saved characters. Create a new one!"  No way to proceed from there.

Pretty soon after getting started I had the UI looking like this:

So there's giant labels all over, some concealing content.  When I (Clemclone) click the mouse I jump and do something, but I can't tell what because I jump *under* my own label.  Cursor is the crosshair but there's a faint line stretching from it to somewhere below my feet.  Glitchy horizontal lines all over everything.  Interface widgets all much too small and their text is miniscule -- and this is after I maxed out the font size... but that only applied to the labels, I think.  And then the settings window said I could do O or ESC to close it so I tried ESC... which at least at itch.io pops you out of fullscreen, causing a reshuffle of UI widgets, leaving the settings window halfway offscreen and I couldn't figure out any way to get it back.

So this could be great but it's still a little rough.

Oho!  I didn't even notice your own site was a thing.  Aaaand... we have green!  Okay then; well done.

I noticed a couple of green CONNECTED flickers on the desktop (which does have its VPN on) but it went back to red; nothing in the console.  Laptop still just red.

Shields down; turns out the laptop didn't have its VPN on after all (dur); Console only shows this, continued indefinitely:

Hm.  Still no joy.  Both laptop and desktop, both using Brave in Ubuntu 22.04, coming through two different servers of the same VPN.

And yet...

Very cool, inside-out kind of idea, only it's not exactly a game because I couldn't figure out any way to do it *wrong*.

Very small display, can't fullscreen, every time I try to do something a bandit or lion wanders up and YOU DIED.

I have played this game for maybe forty seconds.

Server offline.

Okay, so trying this version I only got a few turns in and then bailed.  My complaints before were not about it being too easy, it was about there being no point.  I thought the difficulty was just fine -- although low, since there was nothing to struggle against.  What I said about lack of balance in the resources didn't mean they were too plentiful, it was that relative to each other they didn't make sense, like I only needed one hunter camp but three breweries, and then the one thing I was always running short on was stone -- while digging out a mountain...  Making there be less of everything doesn't fix that (and certainly doesn't make it more fun).

But the big problem of an interesting game is its balances of everything.  You need stone to build a lumberyard and wood to build a quarry and food to feed workers but the next-level farm needs wood and stone.  And then you get into metal.  You need to develop that economy but you also need to build your defenses or the orcs wipe you out.  Everything you do involves a tradeoff; investing in quarries starves your mines; investing in your economy starves your defenses; it's all opportunity costs.  Every thing you do means you're not doing something else -- and you have to do all of it.

With this (as far as I got) you just keep doing stuff and number go up.  Doesn't matter when you do things or how efficiently you do them.  Random events occur to either give or take some resources -- but there's nothing I can do about that, so effectively those don't matter except as a nuisance.

I recommend two things.  First play a bunch of Civilization and/or Dwarf Fortress, and notice that at all times there's something you're trying to accomplish in order to accomplish something else.  Second, try playing this until you've done all the actions you've coded in -- and then keep playing for that long again.  Is it fun?  Is that something you like doing?  You should only publish games that are fun for you to play.  You seem to like publishing a shit-ton of games, and that's cool, but if you really liked them you'd be playing them instead of vibing them out.

Yah, kind of wore the fingerprint off my trackpad finger...

Pretty good; I like it.  Play is quite slow though, and it'd be REALLY nice if the enemy ships didn't look exactly like mine.

Graphically not bad; UI okay; play boring -- very little to do and no reason to do it.  Typical of AI slopwork, which is proved by your putting out 84 games in four months.  Whenever I try an AI slop game it might be engaging at first but then I start looking for the interesting part -- the So What -- and it never arrives.  And I start getting this sad feeling because there's nothing here to care about, and there wasn't even a creator behind it who cared.  Economic balances all off, bad pacing, nonsensical consequences -- because the person responsible for it never cared enough even to playtest it.  Itch is FLOODED with this crap now; the whole site is wrecked.

Worst slop I've seen today.

"ensure timely delivery of the cargo to experience pure fun and mental stimulation".  Or not.

Somebody should be ashamed but I can't tell where there's a human.

There's really nothing to improve for UX -- it's a simple UI and does its whole job perfectly.  My preference for the first design is strictly a matter of taste.  The  original monochrome line drawings are, well, presumably AI, but decent and quite a different presentation from every other game out there.  Your first draft is a fresh way of presenting its problem.  I think having more colors doesn't improve anything because the colors don't add information.  I don't know whether you play Paradox games but they have lots of under-the-hood complexity that *could* be presented in plain, flat maps, but they junk it up with animated marching soldiers and rippling oceans that make my cpu run MUCH too hot *for no reason*.

I'm someone who likes minimalist presentations.  Your first pass had the decorative frames and stuff... but stopped there!  So nice!  Not raytraced toons pretending to battle!  But I'm also pretty extreme in my minimal direction and there's no reason you need to listen to me.  Make it the way that looks best to you.  That will be the best way.

Well actually I prefer the original.  The main thing though is it doesn't make any difference -- no UX improvement, so why bother?

That's a really good development from the battle test version.  Very promising!

Outstanding!  Best modernist-novel-to-game I've seen.  I can't do platformers at all, but you get the Bundrens.

*Practice*!

Wow -- well that's pretty comprehensive!  I look forward to it.

Pretty nice.  Needs some QOL fixes, like Next Unit; movements are *very* slow.  Economy a little weird -- charging two turns of income to replant mushrooms is very expensive.  More goblin babies than I could use -- be nice to turn off a hatchery for some income.

Okay idea but bugged.  Can't upgrade mineshaft; chests don't go away when you take them; alerts say I've lost gold and I lose wood; alerts say I've lost food and I lose food *income*.

But kind of fatal: all actions succeed.  There is no "play", you just take a bunch of steps.

Good response.  Sorry to be disagreeable.

Why do an exact copy of Dragonsweeper?  Unambitious.

No good.  "Levels" do not vary, goals are often not possible.  Obvious vibe slop.

Oh, and one last thing: Listen to your critics, but not too much.  The main thing is to make things, and that should be the things you want.

Also, sorry for being harsh; I had just played through and was feeling kind of frustrated.  You've got several things right here.  For one, there's a fair number of games on Itch that don't even work -- so you've cleared that hurdle.  Also there are a LOT of games here that are just plain hideous, and you don't have that problem either (the way the girl looks -- pretty! friendly! -- does not really make sense for the scenario but everything else looks fine).

I've been trying to sort out what the problem really is with the logic in this, since good escape puzzles often have you use things in non-normal ways and isn't that illogical?  I think it's really about what a person would do in the situation.  If I woke up in that living room and found a knife in the kitchen I would not think "I'll use this knife to dig in that flowerpot."  I also wouldn't think "I need to boil some water to get out so I should fix this kettle," because at that point in the progress I have no reason to think hot water will be useful.  Instead I'd smash the window with the flowerpot and leave that way; The End.  What you want to do is require lateral thinking; what this game has is all-over-the-place thinking.

Also consider the UX a form of drama.  The table in the corridor is a hotspot -- why?  Only so you can put the glass on it later (for no reason).  That makes the table a character in your drama, but a character that doesn't do anything; it's like having extra people standing around on the stage, blocking the view of the action without contributing to it.

Do a bunch of other escape puzzles; take notes on *every move you make* and think about why you did those things.  Rate how much you like each game and figure out why you feel that way.  The point of these is not to make just a string of kooky actions where you try everything everywhere and eventually something works -- there has to be a reason for it every time.

Good luck!

This game is bad.  Sorry.  What you call "story" is not really a story -- and escape room games mostly don't need a story anyway.  The problem here is that the items don't relate to each other in any logical way and the hotspots don't behave consistently.  If there is a knife on a table I should always be able to pick it up -- but maybe I don't know where to use it; if I search a bookcase once I should get all its clues -- but maybe I can't understand them; if there's a trap door I should be able to open it or it should be locked.  If the girl drugged me to start the story, why didn't she just hang me up in the attic the first time instead of drugging me again?  What's the point of having a basement if the only thing that happens there is passing out again?  Why is one houseplant clickable but not the other?  Why do I not find the sleeping pills in the couch the first time?  Why would I want to dissolve them in hot water and leave that on the table?

Basically every single move in this is arbitrary -- it could be anything.  It seems like you let some LLM design this bundle of interactions and you figured that was good.  Study some other escape rooms and think about how each step makes logical sense -- which isn't always the case: bad escape rooms always have problems with their logic.  This is *all* faulty logic.